Friday Evening Videos: Special End-of-the-World Edition!

In case you haven’t heard, it seems the world is supposed to end tomorrow, or rather begin to end as all the faithful born-again Christians get Raptured off to their eternal reward while the unrepentant sinners have to endure five months of torment until the earth finally explodes. Or something like that. Given that I’m largely indifferent to religion, I’m kind of hazy on the details. But I do know that an 89-year-old evangelical radio personality named Harold Camping has calculated through some arcane Bible-based numerological formula that the End of Days starts tomorrow, May 21, 2011, right around suppertime. Of course, this is the same guy who predicted the Rapture would happen back in September of 1994. And then again in 1995. But for some reason, despite the rather glaring lack of Armageddons over the past couple of decades, people keep listening to this con artist, so there’s been all kinds of buzz this week about what’s going to happen — or not happen — on Saturday.

Personally, I’m planning to cut my lawn and pull a few weeds, then in the evening perhaps visit friends, go see Pirates 4, or just sit home and watch all those season finales The Girlfriend has DVR’d. That’s because I am reasonably certain that if this mass teleportation thing happens, I’m not too likely to be among the saved. After all, I was once told by a Canadian college professor that I was one of the two most blasphemous bastards he’d ever met. (Now there‘s a good story…)

I think it goes without saying that things are going to be very different if the Rapture does occur. Fortunately, we left-behind Gen-Xers will know exactly how to behave in the terrible, new post-Rapture world. We were briefed on what it would be like nearly three decades ago by all those nihilistic music videos that borrowed their wardrobes and set trappings from The Road Warrior. This could be our moment to shine, kids! Dig out your punk-rock leathers and old football shoulder pads, and get ready to face the collapse of civilization! Our tribe will need to stay socially organized, though, and I think you’ll agree we can best accomplish that through a shared anthem. I have the perfect one in mind, a song by Blue Oyster Cult — yes, those guys who did “Don’t Fear the Reaper” — that probably no one remembers except me, but trust me, it really is perfect for what we’re facing come Sunday morning… ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present “Dancin’ in the Ruins” from the Club Ninja album (long out of print, naturally):

If that doesn’t work for you, how about a little Tom Petty? Here’s another post-apocalyptic wonderland presented in the song “You Got Lucky.” The irony for we damned types is purely intentional, of course:

Tom Petty – You Got Lucky from RescueTech LA on Vimeo.

Man, if you’re any kind of sci-fi geek, you gotta love that one… there’re the obvious riffs on the Mad Max films, of course — the motorcycle, the weird outfits, the general “lost civilization” feel — but we also get Vasquez Rocks, a distinctive formation not far from Los Angeles that has appeared in countless films and television shows, most notably the original Star Trek TV series. Then there’s the weird purple sky rushing overhead at unnatural speed, no doubt inspired by similar effects in the George Peppard/Jan Michael Vincent flick Damnation Alley. The video clip that Petty watches of LA being destroyed by alien spacecraft comes from Galactica 1980, the utterly indefensible sequel series to my beloved original Battlestar. And lastly, I’m not 100-percent certain, but I’m thinking the vehicle Petty drives up in is a maze-car from the old Logan’s Run TV series. Anyone able to verify that? Or tell me where I can loot one after The End comes?

On a more serious note: I’ve been having some fun with this Rapture thing, but the fact is, a not-insignificant number of people really believe this nonsense. They’re preparing for it, worrying about it, and counting on it. In extreme cases, they’ve stopped paying bills, given away possessions, and even broken off relationships. While I don’t for a moment believe people are going to start vanishing tomorrow, the Rapture is a very real phenomenon in the sense that it’s having a real effect on human lives. And I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen to those believers come Sunday morning when they realize that nothing happened. Will they lose their faith? Will they beat themselves up thinking they failed somehow, that they weren’t worthy of being Raptured, or of bringing it about? Will they just assume that Camping got his sums wrong again, as he’s done at least twice before? And how will they react to these realizations? Will some people commit suicide? Or fall into serious depressions? At the very least, are they going to end up feeling completely and utterly humiliated by the whole deal? Those feelings can be devastating, too.

Look, it’s not my place to disparage anyone else’s religious beliefs — gently mock them perhaps, but not outright piss on them — because I figure what someone believes is their business, not mine, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with my life, then why should I care? But when it comes to something like this, a belief that very well can and probably will result in genuine harm to people… well, it pisses me off that there are folks like Camping out there scaring the gullible, whipping up emotions and then acting like they’ve done nothing wrong when those emotions get dashed. He may not be making any money off this, but he is a sort of con artist. And he and everybody like him needs to just shut up. Before someone really does get hurt…

May192011

Something That Has Nothing to Do with Space Shuttles

Here’s a tip for my local readers: I’ve just learned that the Tower Theatre, Salt Lake’s local arthouse cinema, is going to continue its summer tradition of running cult-favorite movies (as well as some genuine film classics) on Friday and Saturday nights at 11 PM, with an additional screening Sundays at noon for those who can’t handle the late-nighters anymore. It’s a great-looking line-up this year, too:

If you’ve never been to a late-night screening of a beloved cult movie, you’re missing out on one of life’s great experiences. The Girlfriend and I attended a midnight showing of Labyrinth at the Tower a good 10 years or more ago, and it completely changed my opinion of that strange little movie. It’s one of Anne’s favorites, but I’d always been indifferent to it until that night; experiencing it with an engaged (and frequently interactive!) audience made all the difference, and I left the theater with a new appreciation of it. I imagine we’ll be going to that one again, and I’d also like to catch Jaws and The Road Warrior, two of my favorites that I’ve never seen on the big screen. Tickets for these screenings are cheap, only five bucks; if you’re a collector of cool and interesting stuff, I’m told that the Tower has taken a hint from the legendary Alamo Drafthouse and will be creating unique posters for each film that will be available for purchase.

There’s no website for the Summer of 35mm program, but they do have a Facebook page. Check it out, and maybe I’ll see you there!

May192011

Another Peek at Atlantis in the VAB

I know I’m getting a bit monomaniacal on the subject of space shuttles, but I can’t help it… there’s so much cool stuff floating around the web right now that I want to share. I hope it’s not getting too tiresome.

Here’s a photo that caught my eye earlier today of Atlantis being lowered into position alongside the “stack,” i.e., the combined external tank and solid-rocket boosters. As I said last night, the sight of a 150,000-pound spaceplane dangling 500 or so feet up in the air, inside a building no less, amazes me:

See that little red dot down there on the platform with the smaller white dot on top? That’s a person wearing (presumably) a red jacket and a hardhat. Just to give you some sense of the scale we’re dealing with here.

Meanwhile, up there in the sky, Endeavour astronauts have successfully installed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment on the side of the ISS using the shuttle’s robot arm, and I understand it’s already sending back usable data. The orbital work day is winding down with astronauts Drew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff “camping out” in the station’s airlock in preparation for their spacewalk tomorrow. Because the air pressure in their spacesuits will be lower than what they’ve been breathing inside the station and shuttle, they could suffer from the bends if they have nitrogen bubbles in their blood, just like deep-sea divers who ascend too quickly. So during the night, the pressure in the airlock will be gradually lowered to help them acclimate. It’s not like the movies where people just throw on their suits and walk outside as casually as you’d put on a coat!

Credit where it’s due: the image of Atlantis came from NASA’s own TwitPic feed.

May182011

Miscellaneous Space Stuff

Just to update all the Loyal Readers (I follow this stuff so you don’t have to!), Endeavour arrived at the International Space Station early this morning. The ISS is starting to resemble a busy airport with all the arrivals and departures: on Monday, three members of its crew will undock one of the Soyuz capsules currently moored to the station and return to Earth; their replacements will be coming up in another Soyuz on June 9. In the meantime, Endeavour will remain at the station until June 1. You know, this is the way it ought to be, an orbiting waystation on the frontier between Earth and the universe beyond, with regular “commuter” flights coming and going every week — maybe even every day! — while other, more ungainly vessels designed for pure spaceflight wait nearby to take passengers to all the outward destinations. I know, I saw 2001 too many times as a kid, but this is the vision we were once promised, a vision that seemed so reasonable, so inevitable. I can’t help but get a little misty when I see echoes of it here in the real world.

Anyway, the shuttle’s cargo of spare parts — conveniently packaged on a kind of “pallet” called the Express Logistics Carrier 3 (ELC-3) — has already been offloaded by the orbiter’s robotic manipulator arm and attached to the station. Upcoming spacewalks will focus on dispersing and installing the equipment around the station. The task for tomorrow, though, will be setting up the AMS experiment package I mentioned the other day.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth:

That’s some of the crew of STS-135, the very last shuttle mission, posing in front of their ride, the shuttle Atlantis, as it was moved yesterday to the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, where it will be mated to an external fuel tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters for the final time. As of now, it’s inside the VAB, hanging vertically in one of the “high bays,” as you can see here. An amazing sight, a vehicle roughly the size of an Airbus 320-200 airliner dangling from an impossibly high ceiling like a Christmas-tree ornament. I wish I could see it in person. But you know I’ve been thinking the past few days just what an amazing age we live in, how much unprecedented access we space buffs have to all of this stuff now. YouTube, Twitter, NASA’s official websites, live video streaming, and the ubiquity of digital cameras have opened up the space program in ways that couldn’t even be dreamed of back in Buzz and Neil’s heyday. Or even just a decade ago, for that matter. How sad, then, that there will be nothing for us to see come fall…

I don’t know. I’m trying to be optimistic about the future. SpaceX and some of the other private companies are making amazing strides toward manned spaceflight, and NASA is also promising that it’s not finished sending humans into the black. (Case in point: a recent interview with NASA administrator Charles Bolden in which he swears up and down that America is headed for deep space, that it will happen and we’ll be on the forefront just as we always have.) But it really does feel like an age is ending, doesn’t it? Hell, one of the men who authored the legislation that created NASA just died this week, and my first thought was “how appropriate that he should leave just as the dream he helped start is dying as well.” All the talk about regrouping and setting new goals and getting our butts back out there sounds a lot like someone who’s lost confidence and is trying to convince themselves that the game really isn’t over. I hope I’m wrong about that. But as I’ve said so many times before, the 21st century ain’t all it was meant to be.

For now, though, I can at least revel in the last warm embers of the fading fire. Videos below the fold, for those who are interested…

May162011

Endeavour Is Up

Photo credit: Pat Benic/UPI/Newscom

I can’t believe something as important to me as the penultimate shuttle launch slipped my mind, but somehow it did: I forgot that Endeavour‘s rescheduled launch date was today, so I was caught off-guard this morning by the news that she had blasted off on her final mission, designated STS-134, at 8:56 a.m. EDT, or just before I got up at 7 a.m. mountain time. The official launch video, for those who enjoy such things, is here. (For some reason, NASA has disabled embedding on the video; I have no idea why, considering Discovery‘s final launch clip was — and still is — readily available.) The vid is somewhat disappointing — it’s almost all overexposed footage from the fish-eye cam on the top of the external fuel tank, with the earth appearing as a big white crescent in the background and the tank itself nearly lost in the glare — but there is some interesting stuff at about 6:00, when the shuttle rolls to reorient itself to Earth, and at 8:45, when the tank is jettisoned and the orbiter lifts free. Watch closely during that sequence; you can actually see puffs of gas from the shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters.

This is the 25th flight for Endeavour, which is the youngest of the shuttle fleet, and also, I believe, the lightest in weight. (Interesting tangent: I read an interview not too long ago with one of the engineers who designed the shuttles — sorry, I’ve lost the link and the guy’s name — and he said they were intended to go 100 flights each and in his opinion, they are still capable of doing so. Just a little food for thought…) Named after Captain Cook’s sailing ship HMS Endeavour, she was constructed as a replacement for the destroyed Challenger, flying for the first time in 1992, and was the first shuttle to make a service call to the Hubble Space Telescope. She also carried the first American-built segment of the International Space Station.

On this flight, Endeavour is carrying spare parts for the ISS, as well as a scientific package called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). For something with such a dry name, the AMS actually sounds pretty exciting, or at least potentially so; it’s a collection of eight different instruments designed to look for clues to the origins of the universe, including the mysterious substances known as dark matter and anti-matter. If those long-theorized things actually exist, the AMS is supposed to be able to find them. Endeavour‘s crew will make four spacewalks to install all this stuff. The mission is scheduled to last 16 days, with a middle-of-the-night landing in the wee hours of June 1.

One final word about the photo at the top: Endeavour launched under an overcast sky this morning, leading to some very cool videos of her disappearing into the clouds and at least one really awesome photo of her punching through the cloud deck above. Man, I love this stuff…

May132011

And Another One…

Again, from the Adventureblog Annex, a nifty pic of Han Solo killing time in Mos Eisley:

I love the feel of this, so much like much the opening credits of the old Wild, Wild West television series. I have no idea what’s happening in the background… looks like Chewie just set off a small tactical nuke. I don’t seem to recall that happening in any of the stories I know, but then I have been out of the Expanded Universe loop for a while.

The artist is a chap named Skottie Young, who apparently shares a blog with another gent named Scott Morse. Some interesting interpretations of many beloved characters over there. Give it a look, if you have time to kill this afternoon…

May132011

Isn’t That Always the Way It Goes?

You’ve just managed to talk a girl out of her clothes when in barges ~~her father~~, er, a giant, four-armed dude with the head of a gorilla, or maybe it’s a lion, or some damn thing, and he’s seriously pissed that his little girl is standing there nekkid in this bachelor pad of yours with the suggestive carvings on the walls, and you’ve got a pitcher of something that probably isn’t Hi-C sitting at your feet, and well, he’s just spoiling for a fight. If you’re like me, that’s going to seriously cramp your style. It’s such a drag, man.

On a more serious note, I apologize for throwing up another lame image post instead of something worthwhile — well, as worthwhile as my drivel ever gets — but I just haven’t felt much inspiration to write this week. I guess I’m still picking through the emotional knots surrounding my uncle’s death, or maybe it’s just one of those periods when I don’t have a lot to say. In any event, I hope all you Loyal Readers out there are at least enjoying the cool pictures. There are so, so many of them to be had out there in the vastness of the InterWeb. This particular one is a book illustration of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ immortal hero John Carter of Mars and (I presume) his mate, the lovely Dejah Thoris, being menaced by… well, some freaky thing or other. It’s been a long time since I read the Barsoom stories so I don’t really recognize who or what that’s supposed to be. The artist is a gentleman called Reed Crandall, who was a mainstay of the infamous publisher EC Comics (the one nervous Senators, prudes, and scolds feared was corrupting America’s youth with Tales of the Crypt back in the lily-white 1950s); you can see a gallery of Crandall’s Burroughs-related work here. It’s beautiful stuff, in my humble opinion. I especially like this one. But then, I was corrupted myself as a kid by rock-and-roll album covers and TV shows like Three’s Company.

In any event, credit where it’s due: I spotted this image over at Michael May’s Adventureblog Annex, which is one of those Tumblr thingies Michael set up so he could move this sort of thing off his regular Adventureblog. That’s a pretty good idea, really, a subset of a blog reserved just for trading cool pictures… Hmmmm.

May112011

I’d Buy This Book

Nifty piece of artwork here by a cat named Phil Noto:

There are, of course, quite a few Star Wars tie-in novels that focus on everyone’s favorite Corellian smuggler pilot, but none sport a cover done in the style of classic 1960s pulp paperbacks, and that really is a shame, you know? As a lover of that era’s commercial illustration aesthetic, I almost wish my favorite movie had been made 10 years earlier. Yeah, I would’ve missed seeing it in the theaters and all, but just think of all the cool book covers that would’ve come out!

No? Okay, fine, I’ll just enjoy the post-modern retro-fantasy stuff then…

Incidentally, this came to my attention via Boing Boing. Naturally.

May062011

Friday Evening Videos: “Roll Me Away”

It’s been a solemn week around the old Bennion Compound. My uncle Layne, my mom’s brother, died early Monday morning following a lengthy hospital stay. I intend to write more about him when I get the chance, but for now, I’d like to offer what I think — what I hope — is an appropriate musical tribute.

I have to confess, I really didn’t know Layne very well. He led a wild, troubled life that wasn’t very conducive to close family ties. But I know he liked motorcycles — in his younger days, he actually rode with a notorious Utah biker gang called the Sundowners — and I also know he liked classic rock music. In fact, one of my strongest memories of him is the huge record collection he used to own, several hundred vinyl LPs spanning an incredible range of artists and styles. (I’ve written before about this collection, about how fascinating, titillating, and sometimes downright scary the album covers were to my sheltered young self.) I seem to recall that there were a number of Bob Seger records in that collection, scattered in among the southern rock and heavy metal, but if I’m somehow misremembering that, there should have been. Seger’s music, with its often melancholy tales of blue-collar guys just trying to figure out how to make it in a cold, thankless world, would have made a fitting soundtrack for my ne’er-do-well uncle’s life. Or so I imagine, anyway.

One of my favorite Seger tunes, “Roll Me Away,” seems particularly fitting. Its themes of restlessness and searching for some kind of redemption out there on the open road struck a chord with me years ago. And I suspect it might have done the same for my uncle Layne, if perhaps for different reasons. Regardless, I’d like to post it in his honor. I couldn’t find an official video for it — videos aren’t really Bob Seger’s thing, it appears — but I thought this fan-made clip was pretty good, and in any event, it’s really the song itself that matters here.

Wherever you are now, Layne, I hope you’re rolling along with warm wind in your hair and miles of open road stretching out in front of you. Keep riding, keep searching, and maybe, as the song says, next time we’ll all get it right…

May042011

Midnight in the Arrivals Terminal

Friday afternoon, I got a phone call from the wife of my old friend Keith — now living on the east coast — who had to fly into Salt Lake on very short notice to attend to some important family business. She wondered if he could impose on me to pick him up from the airport? Sure, I said, no problem. She apologized that it was so last-minute, and that Keith’s plane was arriving so late. Again, I said, no problem… I tend to be a night owl anyway, and I actually like going to the airport. It lets me people watch and fantasize about going somewhere myself.

Well, his plane got delayed — he texted me from Chicago, with another apology, to which I replied with another “no problem” — so by the time he finally arrived in SLC, it was very late indeed. Just in case you’ve never been in an airport past 10 PM, let me tell you… things get kinda weird. People tend to let their hair down a bit more than they might when broad daylight is streaming through the skylights above.